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Swing% exactly in line with where it was in the middle of the decade. FG doesn't have first pitch swing%, but I'm sure someone here with a pitch f/x or retrosheet database can run that. I'm guessing it won't be any different than the overall swing%.

Offense too high, use BITGOD argument to rail against cheaters.
Offense sinking, the game is in trouble.

Call me crazy but these things flucuate over the decades because of many factors and by and large the sport has enough smart/skilled people to adapt along with it. That way lies madness and no web hits, and thus we get this article.

1) Offense was out of whack at the height of the sillyball era, roughly 1995-2004.

2) We should be concerned that offense has been declining since the end of the sillyball era.

But you can't argue both at the same time. To be fair, Verducci is not arguing (1), but I bet most fans would go along with that proposition. If so, the fact that offensive totals have been drifting downward in recent years would be a good thing, not something to be alarmed about.

It’s like a major corporation with seven straight years of operating at a financial loss insisting that nothing is wrong.

No, actually, it's nothing like that. Corporations exist to make profits, so seven years of losses would be of great concern to them. But baseball doesn't exist for the purpose of maintaining scoring levels.

Or you can argue a third one: that's baseball, and neither way of playing the game is really any better than the other. I enjoyed the sillyball era immensely while it was happening. I'm enjoying the more balanced game that seems to be coming back into vogue. I'd probably have enjoyed the Year of the Pitcher, had I been alive for it.

His argument could have been phrased better, but his point is really about aesthetics, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that...largely because it's one I agree with. The games are starting to get a little boring IMO.

Also, I definitely remember watching baseball in 90 degree weather in past years and we haven't had ONE of those this season. What will it take for the Northern Hemisphere to start admitting that this passive-aggressive approach to the Earth's rotational tilt isn't working?

2. Matt Harvey is good.
3. Teams that did well on paper in winter may be out of it early in summer.
4. Phillies are bad and may be blown up.
5. Miguel Cabrera is good.
6. Indians and Pirates are doing well and biggest surprises in baseball, but starting pitching is mediocre and thus current success might not be sustainable.
7. Two most expensive free agent position players (Hamilton and Upton) have sucked.
8. Interleague play is boring.
9. Closers are overrated. Lots of guys can and have done it. Teams made playoffs in 2012 in spite of losing closers for most of the season.
10. We're overdue for no-hitter since it's been 4 years since we've gone this far into the season without one and since hits per game are down again this year.

clicking through will just make your head hurt. I have whiplash from reading the excerpt above and then reading:

The most amazing part of his three-home run game Sunday night was that Cabrera was behind on the count 0-and-2 three times -- and went single, homer, homer in those three at-bats. He saw 13 pitches with two strikes: he took seven for balls, fouled off three and smashed the other three for hits.

Verducci should chide Cabrera for that approach (waiting for his pitch), yet he seems to be impressed by the same approach he thinks is "broken".

I wish he and others would give more credit to the pitchers in this whole "hitters stink" meme. I realize that the ratio of positive tests doesn't really bear this out but maybe a higher percentage of hitters were on steroids, and that spurred a development in clean pitching (or the gains to pitchers were more lasting than the gains to hitters). Hitting is hard. Would he rather see more weak grounder early in the count?

Good points about walk% and swing%. The difference is strikeouts. It's not like hitters are trying to fail at the plate. The pitchers have gotten better. Fangraphs has velocity data (input by BIS video stringers) for about a decade, and we have pitch fx data for 7 years now. I forget the exact magnitude, but it's up considerably.

If you want a game with fewer strikeouts you might have to move pitchers mound back 5 feet at this point. Then you'd have to deaden the ball to keep it in play, or else the sacred homerun records will start falling again.

The excerpt is stupid enough that I don't want to reward it with a click. Does anyone know what the other nine items on his list are?

2. Not a single major leaguer uses songs from “K-On! The Movie” as their walk-up music. This shows a disturbing lack of respect for anime theme songs.
3. Major league clubhouses are split over the prospect of Martha Stewart cookware being available at JC Penney’s. National League teams would prefer that MLB continues to buy their cookware from Macy’s while AL teams are fine with using the potentially less expensive JC Penney’s cookware.
4. The Mariners are unsure what effect moving in the fences has had on their right handed hitters, since none of them has hit a ball to the warning track so far at Safeco Field.
5. Jermaine Dye is still retired.
6. Teams wearing 1918 uniforms on throwback days will be required to have one player work at a shipyard on that day. The player will be chosen by lottery, dependent on the ability to use a blowtorch.
7. Bud Selig is convening a committee to examine the issue of forming a committee to look into the possibility of choosing the right method to find committee members for a potential committee to look into the possibility of moving the Oakland Athletics to San Jose.
8. Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones is sure that Ike Davis has been replaced by an alien.
9. The MLB players union is insisting that any robo-umpires be built in the shape of Robby from “Forbidden Planet”.
10. MLB is going to introduce a rule that only maple bats may be used in games in Toronto on Canada Day.

The Mariners are unsure what effect moving in the fences has had on their right handed hitters, since none of them has hit a ball to the warning track so far at Safeco Field.

Actually ... The M's offense is suddenly not sucky. Well some of them still are but Smoak is up to a 108 OPS+, Seager 129, Ibanez 123 (300 ISO), Saunders 102, Morse 116, Morales 124 and even Bay and Shoppach off the bench with 120 and 117. Heck, Brendan Ryan's got his OPS+ over 0.

I'm not a big interleague fan, but how is interleague play any more or less boring than intraleague play? I don't really understand his argument there. So what, we don't get jazzed about Royals/Pirates. We don't get jazzed about Royals/Mariners either.

The implementation of this new interleague schedule has gotten my dander up far less than I thought it would.

No, actually, it's nothing like that. Corporations exist to make profits, so seven years of losses would be of great concern to them. But baseball doesn't exist for the purpose of maintaining scoring levels.

His argument is that the prevalent offensive strategy of this day is failing, not all of baseball. And yes, a good way to measure whether an offensive strategy is working is runs scored. Verducci isn't the daft one in this exchange.

His argument is that the prevalent offensive strategy of this day is failing, not all of baseball. And yes, a good way to measure whether an offensive strategy is working is runs scored. Verducci isn't the daft one in this exchange.

But he's still refusing to consider the pitching side of the equation. Do teams with more passive players score fewer than teams with less? The analogy only works at the team level, applying it to the league ignores the fact that league wide trends are harder to break down into something as simple as "the current approach isn't working."

But he's still refusing to consider the pitching side of the equation.

It goes without saying. The strategy is working a little less all the time because pitchers are adjusting to beat it. I'm not saying he's right, just that his argument isn't crazy. The point of my post wasn't that I was supporting Verducci's argument necessarily but that Tom was having such fun snarking he missed the actual argument being made.

Verducci's argument fails to observe a.) the teams with the lowest walk rates still tend to have the worst offenses, b.) (perhaps more significantly) an increased focus on defense has coincided with the reduced offense. More teams than ever are using dramatic shifts, and hits are decreasing. That can't be a shocker.

As a fan, I would like to see strikeout rates come down a little bit from where they are now, and a few more balls put in play - it feels like it's starting to get out of hand now, my team fields a lineup with multiple sub-.200 avg, 25% K-rate guys who hit homers, and frankly, they aren't that fun to watch right now. Of course the rising K-rate trend has been a consistent trend for about a century or more. And obviously, I have no ideas/suggestions that could be implemented to turn the tide the other way.

[12] For cumulative seasons, From 1988 to 2013, After 0-2 (within Count/Balls-Strikes), (requiring HR>=200 for entire season(s)/career and AB<30*HR), sorted by greatest percentage of total Home Runs in this split

So is Verducci's new gimmick that he's always bitterly angry about something? Man it must suck being a sportswriter approaching 50. They're never, ever happy. And for someone whose schtick for the last few years has been rage against McGwire and the other players who lied to him about steroids, taking a shot at current hitters with an observation like this: Runs per game is tied with the rate from 2011 for the lowest rate since 1992 seems a little odd.

Hitting was way up for an extended period, that cycle has ended and now we are watching the upswing of the cycle of pitching. This is consistent with history. Younger players and farm systems push the better athletes to the mound right now, many ball players can both hit and pitch, seems right now more of these guys are being asked to pitch. No big.

Barring a remarkable turnaround in the next eight weeks, general manager Ruben Amaro faces a difficult decision: Does he continue to ride this out and hope the team gets hot in the second half? Or does he cut his losses and start shopping Michael Young, Chase Utley and Cliff Lee?

The real question is: "How did it take pitchers 140 years to realise they should throw strikes?"

Hmmm. Let me get back to you in 2153.
I don't follow tennis, but a few years ago there was talk that the men's game had gotten boring due to too many service aces. If the trend continues toward "three true outcome"-ball MLB should do something. Maybe make the ball a tiny bit larger. There have been lots of good suggestions here. I don't think the situation requires drastic action this moment.

FG doesn't have first pitch swing%, but I'm sure someone here with a pitch f/x or retrosheet database can run that. I'm guessing it won't be any different than the overall swing%.

It is. Swing rate on the first pitch was around 30% in 2000, it's between 26% and 27% now. There were two spikes downward, one starting in 2003 and one starting in 2009.

The primary factor as to why overall swing rate hasn't changed, as far as I can tell, is that there are more two-strike counts that skew the data.

The other factor to take into consideration here is that MLB started using QuesTec in 2001, and switched to the current system in 2009. I obviously can't prove anything, but I would suspect that there is a relationship between the increase in called strike percentage and the use of electronic systems for umpire evaluation.

But he's still refusing to consider the pitching side of the equation. Do teams with more passive players score fewer than teams with less? The analogy only works at the team level, applying it to the league ignores the fact that league wide trends are harder to break down into something as simple as "the current approach isn't working."

I don't think it's implausible at all that a generation of hitters raised on "take-and-rake" may be failing to rapidly adjust to a changed pitching strategy.

If pitchers have decided to throw more first pitch strikes, and more strikes in general, and Questec has led to them having a bigger Strike Zone to aim at, a "passive" approach is going to lead to a lot of good pitcher's counts.

I don't think it's implausible at all that a generation of hitters raised on "take-and-rake" may be failing to rapidly adjust to a changed pitching strategy.

It may be vaguely plausible, but 1) it's extremely unlikely that this is the explanation for reduced scoring, and 2) no one (AFAIK) has presented any good evidence to suggest that it is. And since we have clear evidence that pitch velocity is up, our starting assumption should be that reduced scoring reflects improved pitching, not mistakes by hitters.

The other factor to take into consideration here is that MLB started using QuesTec in 2001, and switched to the current system in 2009. I obviously can't prove anything, but I would suspect that there is a relationship between the increase in called strike percentage and the use of electronic systems for umpire evaluation.

Mike, has anyone shown that either/both systems led to more called strikes? My general sense is that these systems have raised the vertical zone (more high strikes called) but shrunk the zone horizontally (fewer outside pitches called for strikes). Are we sure the net effect was to increase called strikes?

His argument is that the prevalent offensive strategy of this day is failing, not all of baseball. And yes, a good way to measure whether an offensive strategy is working is runs scored. Verducci isn't the daft one in this exchange.

"Daft" is an excellent description of this kind of analysis. Using the same "logic," one could have written in 2000: "What will it take for teams to start admitting that this hyper-aggressive, strike-every-batter-out philosophy isn’t working? Apparently almost a decade of declining results isn’t enough. The past seven seasons have featured the seven highest strikeout rates in baseball history. And yet scoring is up by a full run per game. HR per game is at an all time high."

The fact that some set of players is doing "X," while at the same time we observe "Y" occurring, does not mean that X caused Y. The simple fact that scoring is down doesn't necessarily mean that hitters' strategies are "failing." They may be taking exactly the right proportion of pitches (or not enough). Without more information and more analysis, we have no idea whether hitters' are pursuing the optimal take/swing strategy.

For a quick and dirty analog of patience = run production I looked at the relationship between OPS and p/pa for qualified AL hitters in 2003, 2008, and 2013. R-squared was .072 in 2003, .038 in 2008, and .018 in 2013.

What's changed is the amount of suck at the high end of p/pa - in 2003 the high end is still above average, just a few guys - ellis/hinske/damon/hatteberg - drag it down. In 2008 there is more suck in the high p/pa numbers (maybe top 10 or 15% are averagish with guys like hannahan, figgins, millar, iwamura, swisher leading the nosedive. In 2013 it's like the whole top quartile sucks except for Mauer, Santana, and Reynolds. Napoli is on his own island at 4.51 p/pa. The interesting outliers in 2013 are Cabrera and Davis in that they are below average on P/pa but the two highest OPS guys in the AL - pulling up the low end.

I would like to do some more (use OPS+ instead, look at more years) but I'm slow at this kind of analysis and I have a job, so . . . maybe tonight. unless it's already been done or what I'm doing is pointless!

is verducci complaining that hitters can't recognise a strike and swing at it? Are these "strikes" that hitters are taking actually IN the strike zone or in the umps' zone of the minute? or virtually unhittable stuff on the corners?

or does he think that hitters just want the pitcher to keep throwing because they are too lazy to swing and maybe they will get a walk?

#46 A lot of hitters try to swing only at pitches they can drive (at least until they get two strikes). The successful counter to that rates to be, OK you're now 0-2 because I've thrown 2 strikes that you've disdained.

Larry Andersen made a career out of this. Obviously not the only pitcher to do so, but late in his career he placed a tremendous emphasis in getting ahead of the count (when we first started to get by count data, only Greg Maddux was better at getting to an 0-1 count -- at least according to one of the old Stats Scoreboards)

It strikes me as plausible that this goes hand in hand with increased shifting. If you identify hitters who take pitches that will be called strikes early in the count, you know how to pitch them.